Identifying and Advocating Best Practices in the Criminal Justice System. A Texas-Centric Examination of Current Conditions, Reform Initiatives, and Emerging Issues with a Special Emphasis on Capital Punishment.

An hour’s drive northwest from Baton Rouge sits the Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola, the largest maximum security prison in the United States. On the site of a former slave plantation, it currently houses close to 5,000 inmates and covers more ground, at 18,000 acres, than the island of Manhattan. Surrounded on three sides by the Mississippi River, its stunning physical isolation and distinctive antebellum feel have provided the backdrop for numerous feature films and documentaries, including “Dead Man Walking,” “Monster’s Ball” and “The Farm.” For Southerners, especially African-Americans, Angola is both a prison and a state of mind, a relic from before the civil rights era, when white supremacy was the custom and racial segregation was the law.

Few people know this better thanWilbert Rideau. Convicted of the murder of a white bank teller in 1961, Rideau, who is black, spent 44 years in prison, most of them at Angola, before being released. His painfully candid memoir, “In the Place of Justice,” is indeed, as its subtitle promises, “a story of punishment and deliverance,” told by a high school dropout who escaped Angola’s electric chair to become an award-winning prison journalist. As such, Rideau is the rarest of American commodities — a man who exited a penitentiary in better shape than when he ­arrived.

And:

As reforms were implemented, the violence decreased. The new Angola owed much to Rideau’s skills as editor, gadfly and ombudsman. While in prison, he became a national celebrity, appearing on “Nightline” with Ted Koppel and winning journalism’s coveted George Polk Award. Rideau is hardly modest about it all. His memoir is stuffed with self-serving vignettes in which he persuades a skeptical warden or some other doubting official to make a change that dramatically brightens convict life or helps defuse a riot. And he is especially disdainful of “outside” prison activists like Sister Helen Prejean of “Dead Man Walking” fame for meddling in a world he claims they can’t possibly understand.

In 2005, the man Life magazine had featured as “The Most Rehabilitated Prisoner in America” was granted yet another trial. This time, the jury convicted Rideau of manslaughter, not first-degree murder, and the judge sentenced him to a term of 21 years, the maximum. “Because I had served more than double that,” he explains, “I was freed on the spot.”

In the final chapter, Rideau writes poignantly of the simple blessings that await him each day. But it’s clear that bitter memories linger as well. Looking back, he accuses the black community of abandoning him. “I find it ironic that I socialize almost entirely in a white world,” he notes. “But that’s because almost all of the people who tried to get me out of prison were white.” And yet he refuses to return to his boyhood home in Lake Charles, where his elderly mother lives, “owing to the hostility expressed toward me by some of the white townsfolk there.” Wilbert Rideau has spent his adult life earning redemption. Now, perhaps, is the time to find peace.

Earlier coverage of Wilbert Rideau's compelling book begins with this post.

Tags:
book, book review, capital punishment, Capital Punishment on Trial: Furman v. Georgia and the Death Penalty in Modern America, David Oshinsky, death penalty, In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance, incarceration, journalism, memoir, New York Times Book Review, Wilbert Rideau

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The StandDown Texas Project

The StandDown Texas Project was organized in 2000 to advocate a moratorium on executions and a state-sponsored review of Texas' application of the death penalty.
To stand down is to go off duty temporarily, especially to review safety procedures.

Steve Hall

Project Director Steve Hall was chief of staff to the Attorney General of Texas from 1983-1991; he was an administrator of the Texas Resource Center from 1993-1995. He has worked for the U.S. Congress and several Texas legislators. Hall is a former journalist.